


Lay That Pistol Down

by Sholio



Category: Agent Carter (TV)
Genre: Accidentally High, Drugs, Fake/Pretend Relationship, Friendship, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Male-Female Friendship, Sharing a Bed, background Peggy/Daniel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-28
Updated: 2018-01-28
Packaged: 2019-03-10 12:11:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,329
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13501424
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sholio/pseuds/Sholio
Summary: Peggy gets hurt on a case, and Jack's the lucky sucker who gets to deal with it.





	Lay That Pistol Down

**Author's Note:**

  * For [glorious_spoon](https://archiveofourown.org/users/glorious_spoon/gifts).



"-- wish I could be with her. God, I wish -- I'd jump on the next flight out, you _know_ I would --"

"Sousa. Knock off the self-flagellating. You're giving me a headache." Jack leaned a shoulder on the wall and tipped a quick smile at a pair of nurses passing by the telephone bank just off the main hospital lobby. "Look, I know you would. Peggy knows you would. By this point, the entire nursing staff probably knows you would. And if you think Peggy would _want_ you to drop out in the middle of crisis negotiations and come running to her side, then I guess maybe she married an idiot after all."

"Wow, marital advice from you, Jack. I'll be sure and take it with all the consideration it deserves."

But he sounded a little less miserable. Jack grinned and leaned his head back against the wall. He got it, in theory at least. Being stuck on the other side of an ocean with someone you cared about in the hospital had to suck. And, Peggy being Peggy, it wasn't _just_ that she was hurt, because of course she'd gotten hurt on a case and that meant the people who had tried to run her down with a Studebaker were still out there.

"I'll stay on her 24/7," he said, turning serious for a change. "They won't get a second chance. I promise you that."

"I know," Daniel said, and the naked sincerity in his voice startled Jack. 

They'd come a really long way from those old, early SSR days.

"Anyway," Daniel added, with an almost-flippant note creeping into his voice, "maybe it's just as well I'm stuck in Germany right now, because as you're about to find out, Peggy's a terrible patient."

"What, really?" Jack said. "Peggy? _The_ Carter, as I've heard a few of the new recruits call her, which is hilarious by the way? A terrible patient, I would never have guessed."

"No, really. You don't know the half of it. When she was --" Daniel stopped.

"When she was ...?"

"Never mind. Just ... remind me to tell you the rebar story someday, over drinks. You're going to want a drink for that. Actually, you're going to want a drink after dealing with Peggy in full convalescence mode. She's almost as bad as you were."

"Thanks a lot."

"Tell her ..." Daniel hesitated; for a moment there was only the hiss and crackle of a trans-Atlantic telephone connection. "Tell her I wish I could be there. Tell her I love her."

"I'll be sure and give her a kiss from you, Sousa."

"You go right ahead and do that. I'm looking forward to seeing the bruises." Daniel paused again, static hissing on the line: that awkward moment at the end of a phone conversation when neither party wanted to hang up and both knew they had to. 

"Look," Daniel said at last, "just ... be careful, okay? Both of you."

"When aren't we?"

Daniel laughed as he hung up.

Jack leaned against the wall for a moment, and wished the bastard _was_ here. Or the Jarvises, or any of Peggy's usual support team. But he and Peggy were here in Miami on a case, everyone else was half a country or half a world away, and he needed to go see about springing Peggy out of this joint.

"I'm here to see the patient in 103," he told the duty nurse, flashing his badge along with a sunny smile.

"The young lady?" She barely glanced at the badge. "No, you can't see her."

"What? Why not?"

"Because she's unwell, and I won't allow a gentleman caller to bother her." She gave his badge a disdainful glance. "No matter _what_ you flash around."

"I don't suppose you have a sister named Miriam up in New York, do you?"

" _Excuse_ me?"

They were interrupted by another nurse who came by just then with a clipboard in hand. Jack was thinking she looked vaguely familiar when she gave him a bright smile and said, "Oh, here to see your wife?"

... right. She'd been on the night shift when Peggy was brought in. "Sure am," Jack told her, grinning back.

"You'll be glad to know she's doing much better, from what I hear."

As she went off briskly about her business, Battleaxe said, "Wife?"

"Yeah, did I forget to mention that?" It had been the path of least resistance to getting information about Peggy's condition.

"Why don't you have the same last name, then?"

Damn, she'd actually _read_ his badge. Jack gave her his most winning smile. "She's British. That's how they do things over there."

He wasn't sure if it was the smile or the fact that a panicked candy-striper came running up just then asking for a mop in 107, but oddly enough, it worked. A moment later he sauntered into Peggy's room, just in time to find her levering herself out of bed with grim determination.

"Are you really supposed to be doing that?"

"I'm feeling much better," Peggy said, moving with the careful deliberation of someone who was either drunk or drugged to the gills. Jack knew it well.

"No, you've got a broken leg and had your face smashed into the pavement." The doctors said she didn't have any internal injuries, which was a god-damn miracle (every time he closed his eyes, Jack kept seeing the car slam into her from behind, her body flying like a rag doll's) but she was a long way away from "fine."

"Doesn't matter. We've a case to attend to." Sitting on the edge of the bed with her broken leg thrust out in front of her, she reached with grim concentration for the crutches beside the bed. Her hand swiped through empty air as she missed.

"What are you going to do, beat them with your crutch until they beg for mercy?" Oh God. She would. He hastily changed tactics. "The only place you're going is to bed, either here or back at the hotel, your choice."

"You're not the boss of me anymore," Peggy informed him, each word enunciated clearly. Jack revised her current level of drugged-ness upward a notch.

"No, just your husband," he couldn't help saying.

She gave him a look that radiated complete and utter confusion. While she was distracted, Jack swiped her crutches and leaned them against the wall out of her reach. 

"... what?" she asked, finally.

"Only for convenient information-gathering purposes."

She was still giving him the look she always gave him when she thought he was up to something, even if in this case it was cross-eyed and angled a little too far to the left. "I thought I was married to Daniel."

Even messing with her wasn't as much fun when she was in a state like this. "You are," he said, more gently than he intended. "This is just for undercover."

"Oh," she said, blinking. "Undercover."

Jack sighed and took hold of her arm, maneuvering her back into bed and deftly catching her opposite fist when she tried to punch him in the balls. Up close she looked even worse; she had two black eyes and road-rash down the side of her face. It was a measure of how out of it she was, he thought, that she hadn't even attempted to fix her makeup; what little she still had on was smeared, and her lipstick had been mostly licked off her cracked lips.

It gave him a shaky feeling, seeing her like that. Also, it filled him with the urge to get out in the Miami underworld and apply his fists to a few faces.

"If you married me while I was unconscious, Thompson, I can and will push you out of the window," she told him as he got her head back down on the pillow using a modified-for-gentleness version of an SOE takedown hold that she'd shown him.

"Oh really? I told Daniel I'd give you a kiss from him."

"You bloody well better not," she said, sounding more like herself.

 

*

 

Eventually Jack managed to get Peggy released into his custody -- or, no, that probably wasn't the right term when referring to hospitals and patients, but in Peggy's case he thought it was appropriate. She was uncharacteristically subdued as he maneuvered her into the taxi. Maybe they'd given her more drugs. Jack approved.

"What room are you in?" he asked, steering her out of the taxi at her hotel. His hotel was halfway across town -- they'd arrived separately and had been maintaining separate covers -- and he hadn't thought to stop there to check out and get his suitcase beforehand. For that matter, he was still wearing the same now-rumpled suit he'd put on yesterday morning, and he hadn't slept, either.

"Room," Peggy said. Her brow furrowed. "I ... it has a 2 in it."

"Never mind." He dug into her purse, ignoring her startled "Hey!" ( _Great_ , he thought, _THAT you notice_ ) and removed her hotel key.

Peggy made it upstairs on her own, wobbling on her crutches with grim determination. Jack unlocked and opened her door, and realized as soon as he did so that there was a potential problem with hanging out in her room for the rest of the week, as he'd been planning. Namely, she had been the only person in the room, and therefore there was just one (queen-sized) bed.

Well, hell. Maybe he could get a room on the same floor. Right now he was too tired to worry about it. 

Peggy had stopped just inside the door and was standing there, looking somewhat lost. Jack steered her to the bed and helped her sit on it. "Docs gave me these for you," he said, showing her a bottle of pain pills, "which I'm gonna put in the bathroom for now, okay? You want anything while I'm up?"

Peggy rubbed at her forehead, frowning. "No," she said after a moment. "I hate -- I can't _think_ , Jack. I _hate_ it."

"Good time to go to sleep, then. Sleep some of it off." 

"Mmm."

He brought her a glass of water and found her struggling to take off her shoes, trying to reach past the cast on her lower leg. Wordlessly he knelt to help, all too aware that she'd done this and a lot more for him after he was shot.

"You're being very nice to me," she said, looking down at him.

"Sucking up to the boss," he remarked, tossing her shoe aside.

"I see."

"Don't worry, tomorrow I'll be back to giving you hell as always."

Peggy gave an unladylike snort. Jack lifted her leg onto the bed, but when he reached for the bedcovers, she grabbed hold of the edge; there was a brief tussle before he let go. "I don't need to be tucked in," she said, sounding almost like her old self.

"Yes, ma'am," Jack said with a brief grin. 

He went over to the window and looked down on the street. Afternoon, long and golden, lay over the city, drawing near to the short tropical dusk. He was too tired, at the moment, to even feel hungry. They could always call down for room service later. Jack drew the curtains, plunging the room into dimness pierced with shafts of soft gold light.

The only furniture in the room, besides the bed, was a small desk and chair by the window. Jack dragged the chair over to the doorward side of the bed, took off his jacket, and draped it over the chair back (carefully; a well-tailored jacket didn't come cheap). He sat down, stretched out his legs, crossed his arms, leaned back and closed his eyes.

There was a soft creak and rustle as Peggy rolled over. "What are you doing?" she asked sleepily.

Jack cracked an eye open. "Catchin' some sleep."

"I can see that." She propped herself up on her elbow. "Why here? I expected you'd go back to your hotel."

"Peggy," Jack said, "someone tried to kill you. I'm not heading across town and leaving you alone and not entirely --" He moved a hand by his forehead. "Compos mentis."

"I am compos mentis enough to defend myself, thank you," Peggy said tartly.

"Oh? Where's your gun?"

It took her a moment to answer. "In -- my purse."

"Which is where?"

Peggy glared at him and looked around the dim room, frowning. "There," she said, pointing to the nightstand, and shuffled across the bed to it. 

She opened the purse, got out the gun, and tucked it under her pillow. Jack watched with a faint grin, then got himself rearranged more comfortably on the chair. "G'night," he said, and leaned back again.

"Jack," Peggy said. He ignored her. She sighed. "Don't be a martyr. If you're going to stay, the bed is big enough for two."

This made him crack an eye open again. Now having migrated to the far side of the bed, she patted the top of the covers.

"You just _want_ to get me in trouble with Sousa, huh?"

"Well," she said with a brief smile, "we _are_ married, you and I, or so I hear." She tried to roll over to face the wall, then settled back with a soft hiss of pain.

Jack didn't have to think about it for long; he'd fallen asleep enough times sitting up on stakeouts to know how unpleasant it was. He hung his shoulder holster over the back of the chair where it was convenient to hand, and lay down on top of the covers, his back to her.

"You want me to wake you up when I get room service later?" he asked without bothering to turn his head.

"Mmmm. Yes, please."

"All right." He curled an arm under the pillow. A sudden impulse prompted him to add, "Good night, Peggy."

After a moment, her hand touched his back, making him jump; he settled back down as she located his arm and patted it lightly. "Good night, Jack."


End file.
